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I love a good definition: Very few things in life wield extreme power as elegantly as definitions do. Because every teeny, tiny definition worth its salt grabs the whole universe, all things, all ideas, all stories, feelings, objects and laws and separates them into distinct pieces, into two different sets: The set of things conforming to the definition and the set of things that don’t. If you’ve read enough definitions, super hero comics are basically boring.

Definitions structure our world. They establish borders between different things and allow us to communicate more precisely and clearly. They help us to understand each other better. Obviously many of them are in a constant development, are evolving and changing, adapting to our always fluid experience of our shared world.

And just as they change, sometimes definitions and the concepts they describe just stop being useful. Today I want to encourage you and me to put one definition and concept to rest that has outlived its usefulness: Let’s kill the term “cyborg”.

The term cyborg has been with us since the 1960s and has influenced more than just cheesy science fiction movies: Talking about cyborgs was a way to describe a future where human beings and machines would meld in order to describe our actual current lifestyles. Because for better or worse: We have been hybrid beings of part nature, part technology of sorts for many many decades now.

Still, the idea of “natural humans” put in contrast to machine-augmented humans was useful to elaborate the requirements that we as a society would need to postulate in order to integrate technology into ourselves, our bodies and our mental exoskeletons in a humane way. It has been a good conversation. But lately it really hasn’t been.

“Cyborg” has mostly been a word to single out and alienate “freaks”. It refers to body hackers that do things to their bodies that the mainstream doesn’t really understand but that they just love to watch like one of those strangely popular torture porn movies like Saw. It refers to people with disabilities in a way that does not include them in whatever the mainstream view of society is or that helps them make a case for how to design and engineer things in a way more accessible but as these weird “others”. I can’t count the amount of times that for example Neil Harbisson has been talking on conferences about his perception augmentation allowing him to hear colors with the gist of it in the media reception being mostly: Look how weird!

Instead of helping us to understand ourselves and our decision to intertwine our lives, worlds and bodies with all kinds of different technologies “Cyborg” just creates distance these days. It doesn’t build bridges for fruitful debates but in fact tears them down to look at freaks on the other side of the river without them coming closer.

We are all cyborgs and we have been for quite a while. But when everybody is a cyborg really nobody is. The distinction from whatever “norm” that the word, idea and definition provided is no longer helpful but actually hurtful for so many debates that we have to have in the next few years.

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In general that would be a good approach but I fear that the term itself is imbued with so much culture and reference that we’d need to create new, different categories and words just to clearly separate all ties to it.